Thursday, November 6, 2008

On Dollhouse Reviews

It’s not often that a book you published more than a year ago continues to pick up reviews, but somehow we’ve done it with Mike Boyle’s Dollhouse. One might speculate that because we’re running some of J.A. Tyler’s work in Thieves Jargon tomorrow, that there’s some sort of favor-for-favor grabass going on here, but you should just chalk it up to coincidence.

12 comments:

A very good question, and the honest answer is, not likely. I mean maybe, MAYBE, if James Greco materializes with a book, because I'd be very tempted, and I've been after him for years to turn in a manuscript. But I'm kind of spent. I've spent the last year and a half learning about publishing on a professional scale, and TJ Press is too much for one person to handle, no matter what kind of generous help I receive. A real solid publishing operation needs some sort of paid staff of, at the very least, four or five people, and that's not in my budget.

What I'm most interested in at this point is working with a well-funded group of people and being one cog, doing what I'm best at: selecting and polishing manuscripts. If that comes together in an independent fashion, cool, I'm on it, sign me up. Or I could do it in a freelance style, find manuscripts, prepare them, get them to agents and/or publishers. Not sure where the future will take me. But I need to play out the fourth quarter, take TJ home to the championship, and then move into the player/coach role.

You also have to find a replacement for you, then. It's not fair or right or cool for TJ to disappear. Even if it's clear that it's never going to be open for submissions again, you should at least leave the site up, with archives, your favorites on the front page. Don't be evil.

"elimae, pronounced el-ee-may, and standing for electronic literary magazine, was founded by Deron Bauman in 1996 and has published essays, fiction, interviews, poetry and reviews. At the end of 2004, Bauman departed to concentrate on other responsibilities, and the editorship was assumed by Cooper Renner."

See just find someone you trust. Renner is just as good as Bauman was. Find someone just as good. Thieves Jargon needs to be around when people begin to take e-lit world for serious.

Has anyone noticed that Wikipedia put out a call for donations and received over two million bucks so far? Wikipedia was once upon a time as unknown as Thieves Jargon and Google once were....

Maybe that's what's kept him motivated for almost a decade? I don't much care, but I certainly don't have any trust issues with it... they published one of my TJ rejects, but that could be said about hundreds of journals. I dunno. Name another magazine that has been around that long? Like, give me a dozen to choose from. Because when the Jargon goes, it ain't gonna be a pretty lit world.